Transfer of Soft Skills into Real Life
Throughout
these soft skills facilitation blogs we have presented different insights as to
what soft skills are and how they have tried to be incorporated into today’s
world. However, can these concepts and ideas really be transferred into real
life day-to-day living?
Transfer
is a key concept (Priest & Gas, 1997) in any and all facilitation, if what
you are teaching/facilitating is not being transferred into how they can use
it in a real life situation it will not be retained by the individual. An
example of this is that it is not related to the outdoors but did come to mind when
thinking of transfer, when I was in a Maths class back in school. I remember
sitting there on so many occasions just thinking,
“When am I going to need
to know this, for example, Pythagoras theorem in real life”
An
to be honest, I have not needed to know Pythagoras theorem but because I thought
like this I chose not to retain that information once I had learnt it. This is
like any skill, if you do not practice or use it you lose it.
There
is research by numerous individuals who have different points of view on how
soft skills are transferable and arguments to go alongside them. Priest and
Gass (1997) and Gass (1985) divided the types of learning into three
categories:
Ø Specific – the learning of particular skills
for use in a closely related situation. For example, in my teaching placement year, I would teach the children them to tie knots that they would
use in climbing; they may be able to use them in different situations but they
were predominantly for use in climbing.
Ø Non-specific – refers to the learning of more
general principles or behaviours and applying them to a different situation. An
example from previous experience is when you let new people belay you; you may
not know their previous experience in climbing but you let them belay because you
trust their judgment. This trust can be transferred into other life situations.
Ø Metaphoric – A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an idea, object or action to signify comparative similarities between two things. I cannot personally come up with an example of when metaphoric transfer has taken place in my presence. Gass (1985) states that the key to metaphoric transfer lies in the power of the metaphoric connection between the adventure and the actual life experience.
An
article by Rhodes and Andrews (2014) looked at the behavioural changes in work
colleagues after taking part in Adventure Education courses. The work
colleagues took part in a 6-10 day Experiential Leadership Development
Activities course delivered to them by the New Zealand Army Leadership Centre. Four
months post course the findings indicated that most of the colleagues (97%)
perceived improvements in their own attitude and behaviour, 87% said they
noticed some improvement in behaviours in similar areas of their lives.
Suggesting, that Adventure Education courses benefited and enhanced intra and
interpersonal skills in the workplace and the day-to-day lives of these
colleagues.
Georges (2015) states that there is a big difference between training and educating an individual. To educate an individual is to increase their intellectual awareness on a subject (Geroges, 2015); to train is to make someone skilled at the carrying out of a given task (Georges, 2015). An example of training someone in a skill would be to get them to do the skill and get an actual feel for it. For example, when teaching someone to belay I do not just tell them how it is done, I get them doing it. This is an example of them learning i.e., educating, about the skill and doing the skill i.e., training. This is the same for soft skills, in that you cannot just tell a person an activity will improve aspects of their soft skills; they have to experience that for themselves.
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| A work outting to Go Ape, was fun and had some laughs but did any of us take anything away from it? |
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| The group I worked with my second summer in America in the Adventure Activities area. Did we learn anything from working in this environment together that we could take into real life? |
Georges (2015) states that there is a big difference between training and educating an individual. To educate an individual is to increase their intellectual awareness on a subject (Geroges, 2015); to train is to make someone skilled at the carrying out of a given task (Georges, 2015). An example of training someone in a skill would be to get them to do the skill and get an actual feel for it. For example, when teaching someone to belay I do not just tell them how it is done, I get them doing it. This is an example of them learning i.e., educating, about the skill and doing the skill i.e., training. This is the same for soft skills, in that you cannot just tell a person an activity will improve aspects of their soft skills; they have to experience that for themselves.
I believe that adventure
can enhance and personally develop an individual, if they take what they learn
from their adventure experience away and apply it to their everyday lifestyles.
If they do not do this, they may revert back to how they perceived things and
life prior to their adventure experience.
Reference
Gass,
M.A. (1985). Programming the transfer of learning in adventure education. Journal of Experiential Education, 8(3), 18-24.
Georges, J.
C. (2015). The Myth of Soft-skills
Training. Available at: http://www.jtemgt.com//PDF/TrainingMyths.pdf.
(Accessed: 7th May 2015).
Priest,
S. & Gass, M.A. (1997). Effective
leadership in Adventure Programming. Leeds, United Kingdom: Human Kinetics.
Rhodes,
H.M. & Andrew, J.M. (2014). Behaviour Change After Adventure Education
Courses: Do Work Colleagues Notice? Journal
of Experiential Education, 37(3),
265-284.
